Silent Menagerie

By Leah Williams

An eerie, yet beautiful paradox presents itself when death reveals something of life - where breathless creatures appear to sleep and inanimate remains imply movement.

Natural history museum collections typically conjure images of cabinets, drawers and seemingly endless shelves of jars of specimens.  These collections are zoos of sorts, silent menageries - a final resting place for millions of creatures extracted from their natural environments for the purposes of scientific enquiry.  But beyond these impressive cataloguing systems and displays, there exists a world of immense beauty, of creatures suspended in time.  Mortality, innocence, fragility and an eerie sense of other worldliness can be observed in these creatures in their artificially preserved states.  

Scientists have carefully and methodically scrutinised these ‘specimens’ in order to gain a better understanding of the complexities of the world we inhabit.  However, there is perhaps an alternative means of extracting knowledge from these creatures, a way of excavating life and beauty from that which is dead and preserved.  Through the medium of photography, Silent Menagerie captures and preserves these creatures in their suspended states as though they were actually living.  A photograph is an imprint of the real, but can it also reveal something of the supernatural?

The works of the Silent Menagerie project explore the concept of the photographic image as a ‘capturer of spirits’, reminiscent of the concept of spirit photography. The ‘discovery’ of spirit photography in 1861 by the Boston engraver, William Mumler, saw the beginning of one of the most fascinating genres in the history of photography.  Whilst attempting a self-portrait alone in his studio, Mumler claimed to have discovered a second, transparent figure on the developed plate, standing beside him.  Such figures would come to be known as ‘spirit extras’, as they continued to appear in the multitudes of studio portraits Mumler produced over a period of almost twenty years.  What was most likely an accidental double exposure coupled with an innocent over-interpretation gave birth to a phenomenon that would capture the imaginations of countless Americans.  Within ten years, spirit photography had travelled to the United Kingdom and Europe where numerous photographic studios appeared to cater for the sudden public demand for images of the dead.

What is interesting about the phenomenon of spirit photography is the idea or the belief that photography was a witness to things that could not be seen with the naked eye.  This notion that photography was somehow privileged in its perception of the spiritual world has surreptitiously woven itself into my own practice.  What is perceived through the viewfinder is not always what manifests itself in the tangible object that is a photograph.  At a macro level, shifts in focus, colour and light occasionally render themselves into surprising and unexpected forms.  These abstract forms and aberrations communicate something of the spirit world that exists within the imaginations of those willing and open to such possibilities.

Martyn Jolly suggests that what is so compelling about spirit photography for us now is that it gives light to,

‘something about the essential nature of photography itself.  Photography stops an image of a living person dead in its tracks, and peels that frozen image away from them.  In this sense, all portrait photographs are spirit photographs because they allow us to see, and almost touch, people as they lived in the past.  The people in these images, once so desperate for an image of their deceased loved ones, are now themselves all dead also, but ironically revenant in their portraits.’*

In his philosophical treatise on photography, ‘Camera Lucida’, Roland Barthes describes ‘[a]ll those young photographers who are at work in the world, determined upon the capture of actuality… [as] agents of death.’**  Photography ‘stills life’ in its shutter click.  As Barthes puts it, ‘Life / Death: the paradigm is reduced to a simple click, the one separating the initial pose from the final print.’***  After this ‘death’ occurs, the photograph becomes the tangible object of the process of embalming.  It renders its subject fixed in time, yet is itself, ‘still mortal: like a living organism, it is born on the level of the sprouting silver grains, it flourishes a moment, then ages.’****  Similarly, the ‘spirit specimens’, preserved in jars of formalin and ethanol, are captured or suspended in time, yet they too will continue to age.  Some will slowly turn a ghostly white or a yellowish shade of pale, much like an old photograph ages with time. 

Images of death are often considered grotesque and taboo, but the Silent Menagerie photographs seek to offer an alternative perspective to the frightening and often violent portrayal of death that we are conditioned to accept. We see in the artificially captured states of these specimens an impression of death that is lasting, seemingly independent of passing time.  However, if we look more closely we can also see impressions of life that our rational minds tell us should not be there and more importantly perhaps, remind us of our own mortality.

*Martyn Jolly, Faces of the Living Dead, (The Miegunyah Press: Victoria), 2006, p.9.

**Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida, (Random House UK Ltd.), 1982, p.92.

***Ibid.

****Ibid.